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Nouveau From 2.6.33 Prepped For Ubuntu 10.04

Phoronix: Nouveau From 2.6.33 Prepped For Ubuntu 10.04

Back in November we shared that Nouveau would finally be pulled into the Ubuntu 10.04 kernel as up to this point Canonical had employed the feature-limited and obfuscated open-source NVIDIA driver known as xf86-video-nv. The Nouveau driver became an option with Ubuntu 9.04, but it was using Nouveau's DDX user-space mode-setting code paths that have since been dropped upstream.The plans to switch over to Nouveau with kernel mode-setting support for Ubuntu 10.04 were great, but then in December there was the very surprising move that the Nouveau driver got pulled into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel...

This is why

For those wanting to try out the Nouveau driver in an easy-to-use manner right now, the full stack can be found on Fedora 12 (along with other recent releases) where it's being used by default. Nouveau support for other distributions can be found in some package repositories, while more vendors should switch over to this reverse-engineered driver once deploying the Linux 2.6.33+ kernel.

Mandriva also switched from nv to nouveau on Dec 24 (announcement).
It is used by default in the recent Mandriva Linux 2010.1 alpha1, and is also manually selectable in configuration tools in the previous stable releases 2009.1 and 2010.0. The 2010.0 One live CDs also have it, used with xdriver=nouveau boot option.

More problems to go... :/
They should get 2.6.33 kernel instead of backporting just video drivers.
It looks like Canonical haven't learned anything from history when they were backporting video drivers and it brought compatibility problems...

boot with nouveau, then run nvidia driver?

Since I would like both flicker-free booting AND fast 3D graphics, CUDA, vdpau, etc, would it be possible to boot with the nouveau driver and then switch to the NVIDIA driver?
Also, when the machine would switch from one driver to the other but keeping the same graphics mode (say 1600x1200@60Hz), would you see flashing?
Just wondering...

Since I would like both flicker-free booting AND fast 3D graphics, CUDA, vdpau, etc, would it be possible to boot with the nouveau driver and then switch to the NVIDIA driver?
Also, when the machine would switch from one driver to the other but keeping the same graphics mode (say 1600x1200@60Hz), would you see flashing?
Just wondering...

No, you can only choose one. Your whish would require restarting most of the system.